21ST CENTURY DINING: A long-awaited vegan burger from Silicon Valley startup Impossible Foods hits select restaurants this month.

At Impossible Foods, [CEO Patrick] Brown, along with 125 colleagues—pedigreed scientists, nutritionists, techno-marketing experts—is working to perfect a vegan version of the all-American ground-beef patty. His elevator pitch is straight-up Silicon Valley: meatless burgers as a “platform to disrupt” the international meat supply. Cows, according to Brown, are “an inefficient technology” requiring too many inputs to create beef, an output that hasn’t evolved since the Paleolithic age. “The whole mission of this company is to make eating animals unnecessary,” he says. “So, we don’t want our product to just be delicious, we want it to be as delicious as meat.” He would never describe his innovation as “a veggie burger,” which conjures images of bland, frozen constellations of grains and beans. His patty is officially “a combination of proteins, fats, amino acids and vitamins derived from wheat, the roots of soybean plants, coconuts, potatoes and other plant sources.” The goal? To reverse-engineer flavors and textures heretofore exclusive to cows.

But will they ever be able to simulate a ribeye?